In b4 BBQ Lighter is to BBQ as Feathercoin is to Litecoin!
No but seriously, it is all very well to flame Liquidcoin for demonstrating the utter stupidity of super-low-difficulty blocks but as we have seen lately super-low-difficulty blocks, with their awesome power to generate almost nothing but orphans, are super-popular.
So maybe Liquidcoin was on to something? Why all the imitators if it was not a coin well worth imitating?
The great innovation of Liquidcoin was to demonstrate the utter fail that so many recent launches have emulated: a difficulty so low that almost all blocks are almost instantly orphaned.
As we have seen, that utter fail is exactly what the customers want, it is the ultimate in fashionable paradox: utter fail is the path to success!
Accordingly, let us put lighter fluid aside for a moment and consider lighter liquid! Fluid is confusing anyway since not all fluids are liquids.
The question we should be asking is would liquidcoin be more successful if its spewing of orphans eventually slowed down?
Recent launches that emulated Liquidcoin's orphan-spewing strategy lacked one key feature of Liquidcoin's approach: they eventually stopped spewing as many orphans, due to their difficulty not being permanently fixed at one value forever.
Might Liquidcoin regain its former popularity if its difficulty eventually became adaptive?
This is a question that can be answered empirically! All that is required is a slight change to Liquidcoin's difficulty adjustment algorithm, changing it from never adjusting to actually adjusting in some way.
I fired up Liquidcoind just now and discovered that, lo and behold, Liquidcoin is still out there... I got two connections right away.
So this is not a dead coin we are talking about here, it is, like BBQcoin itself, an ancient long term survivor, a coin, in fact, that wise CPU miners carefully limiting their hashing power might not even have been experiencing many orphans with at all! Another CPU-miner haven that has been giving CPU miners a chance to mine coins to their hearts' content all these years while the GPU miners blew huge amounts of electricity wielding huge farms full of multi-GPU rigs to divvy up into ever smaller portions some pie that cannot really have been much larger, really, due to the "infinite" divisibility of coins in general, than the quiet backwater pool that Liquidcoin has become.
....................
Arg someone just brought up Liquidcoin, darn, I had hoped to rake in coins all night before posting this.
The TL;DR I was aiming at here is hey lets fix Liquidcoin's difficulty. Let it adjust, as we pretty much do know now that fixing the difficulty is a broken concept that just spams everyone with orphans.
-MarkM-
